Medical data management systems organize and manipulate a variety of data, including patient data, information on procedures and studies that have been scheduled for patients, reports and notes from doctors and technologists relating to procedures and studies, medical images, lab results, billing and insurance information, and many other types of information relevant to medical professionals and management of medical facilities. Many types of medical information may be organized into a workflow, in which the necessary data is passed from one staff member, doctor, group, or department to the next, to assist in providing each staff member with the information that is needed to perform his or her job. Some systems have provided worklists, which provide each staff member, doctor, group, or department with a list of tasks that are to be completed, along with information about each task.
Unfortunately, these worklist displays are often limited in scope, providing information relating only to one activity or set of activities, such as appointment schedules, or scheduled use of an ultrasound system. Such limited-scope systems seldom support tracking tasks from their inception to their completion, through numerous phases, staff members, and departments.
Because they tend to designed to perform a single task, most worklist systems for use in a medical environment are difficult to customize. In many cases, customization requires extensive software work, which may need to be performed by the manufacturer of the system with which the worklists will be used, or by specialized consultants.
Additionally, known worklist systems are often tightly focussed, so that they provide only the information that is immediately relevant to each user of the system. While this arrangement may help with efficiency, it provides little opportunity for information in the worklists to be seen by multiple users.
Another difficulty with worklist systems used in a medical environment is that the information in the worklist may quickly become outdated or stale as conditions change. In some medical environments, conditions may change more rapidly than the worklists are updated, leading to the possibility of errors due to inaccurate or outdated information in the worklists.
Some worklist systems attempt to address this difficulty by querying the database that stores information on tasks to be performed at short, regular intervals (i.e., polling the database). Unfortunately, as the number of workstations and users accessing the worklists increases, the number of queries that must be processed, and the amount of communications or network traffic generated by all of these queries can overwhelm the databases and networks of a medical data management system. This may be especially problematic in systems that handle other tasks, such as medical imaging, that place high demands on networks and database systems.